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You know, all of our reengineering over the years is really coming to a head! The M1 system-on-a-chip (SoC) and the unified memory, GPU, and cores are exciting, and Vectorworks 2022 shines on this platform. How does this affect large 3D model performance? The M1 chip maxes out at 16 GB of memory. SJ - So the 16 GB is a limit, but we see the paging out to virtual memory, and the engineering that Apple has done with the M1 is superb and makes that limitation almost go away.

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(note: Apple just announced new M1 Pro and M1 Max chip due in November) And, of course, we have the M1X chip coming soon, which will go beyond the 16 GB limit. …the paging out to virtual memory and the engineering that Apple has done with the M1 is superb and makes that limitation almost go away. Things work differently between these hardware chip setups.īut you have done lots of testing, right? And what about beta testers and what they are saying? It’s a complex story to tell because it is not a straightforward task to compare a system-on-a-chip (SoC) implementation to a separate CPU and GPU.

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SJ - Well, getting back to the full Metal implementation, we have been working with beta testers for a while now, and we see good reactions about Vectorworks 2022, which is full Metal on Apple, and the response is that it just feels much faster. I realize that when we are talking about the full Metal implementation in the new Vectorworks 2022, we are, of course, talking about Metal on both Intel and the new ARM architecture Macs.

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Which macOS is required now as the baseline for version 2022? So, the performance in graphics with Metal can vary depending on the age of the Mac hardware and the specific OS version they are running. SJ - macOS 10.15 Catalina is the oldest Mac operating system this latest version of Vectorworks runs on. I know we will touch on Metal throughout this conversation about the M1 because the full Metal implementation is a big deal. Still, I want to focus on the M1 because readers and many of your users will be curious about it. Our single-core bottlenecks have, over time, become multithreaded. Some still exist, and the M1 Mac users will see good speedups. But you are right single-core processing is impactful with BIM applications. The M1 chip is a system-on-a-chip (SoC) and wraps CPU, GPU, memory and specialized machine-learning processors, and other specialized cores all together on the same silicon die. It’s precisely like the chip in all of our smartphones, but bigger. But what is unique and perhaps confusing to CAD/BIM users is that its memory is “unified” and shared among CPU, GPU, and the Neural Engine.

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At just 16 GB total, for these days, that seems like a real limitation for professional CAD industry work. SJ - When the M1 was out, the first system we got for testing was the MacBook Air M1 with 8 GB of memory. So Apple’s M1 chip and its motherboard is handling virtual memory that well that you don’t feel it paging out to the SSD drive? And we ran it with our standard models-and yes, the file sizes were pushing out over that limit-yet you don’t really notice it much. Recall that back last November, we were doing our testing on Vectorworks 2021.

There are a couple of things here and there with specific operations that cause some slow-downs with the paging, but really the transition is just smooth. Things, of course, are even better in 2022, which isn’t using any Rosetta. What is the largest BIM model you use in tests? So once Apple ships the M1X that goes beyond the 16GB limit, the performance limitations of paging to virtual memory will essentially vanish. SJ - We have models that push out over the 16 GB limit.Īpple just released new Macs and new Mac chips.

The M1 with 16 billion transistors is now surpassed by the M1 Pro with 33 billion transistors and the M1 Max with 57 billion transistors.

Vectorworks viewer 2021